Occasionally funny and interesting, this one-note memoir eventually wears thin.
Debut memoir about the author’s stint working at West Hollywood’s Standard Hotel, where she was paid to spend a few hours in an enclosed glass box behind the front desk.
Following her upbringing in Georgia and Connecticut, Snellings graduated from the University of Colorado with a journalism degree and decided on a whim to move to Los Angeles with friends. There, she floundered, working intermittently for a modeling agency, as a freelance writer, a waitress, an aspiring actress and, for one night per week, as a so-called “box girl.” The last job was more conceptual than laborious, and Snelling offers every imaginable detail about her weekly hours in the box, which measured 15 feet long, 4 feet wide and 5 feet tall. Required to wear white boy shorts and a white tank top, Snellings earned $100 per shift (8 p.m. to midnight) and was forbidden, while inside the box, from making eye contact with guests or employees, eating or drinking. The box was furnished with only a mattress and pillow, so Snellings read, dozed, watched people and eavesdropped. Her parents, “firmly planted in the one percent,” expressed concern over many of the author’s choices. She could easily have relied on them for financial support but admirably decided to make her own living. She includes other stories, the vast majority of which are superficial, failing to form a cohesive narrative. One chapter, “True Facts about a Box Girl,” is simply a list of random details, including the time she drank a bottle of hot sauce for $500. Snellings’ light musings on the sexualized aspect of working in the box briefly touch on Gloria Steinem’s 1963 article about going undercover as a Playboy Bunny. The author wonders “if Steinem would notice the obvious…metaphor: a woman locked below a glass ceiling.”
Occasionally funny and interesting, this one-note memoir eventually wears thin.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59376-541-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
